Shareholder Responsibility

But campus activists are critical of multi-million dollar HMC compensations, particularly at a not-for-profit institution where the president's salary is approximately $250,000 and the average tenured faculty member receives less than half that.

"I find it amazing that they can pay that much and then say that they don't have the money to tenure new professors, especially minorities and women," says Megan L. Peimer '97, former co-president of the Radcliffe Union of Students. "It substantiates my view that Harvard sees itself as an organization that grows for the sake of growth."

Campus activists also point to the benefits scuffles between the administration and the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers as well as the recent hiring of UNICCO, an outside custodial contractor, as what they consider to be the University's misguided financial priorities.

"It's that and the failure to treat investment as a political and moral issue...that's really upsetting," says Jedediah S. Purdy '97, former president of Perspective, Harvard's liberal monthly.

Over the course of the year, campus activists criticized the Corporation Committee for Shareholder Responsibility for failing to recommend divestment from corporations that do business in Nigeria and Burma, countries with known track records of human rights abuses.

"There are a lot of ways to make money without stripping forests and investing in Indonesian factories that are paying 50 cents a day," Purdy says.

But it's investment that grows Harvard's endowment, which the Advisory Committee for Shareholder Responsibility, advisors to the CCSR, tacitly acknowledges in the principles it uses to determine its stance on issues of social responsibility.

"One [guideline] is the University's investment, which has a return it wants to maximize," which is balanced with the desire "as shareholders to express yourself contrary to management when they are leading the corporation into an area which would not be socially responsible," says Bernard Wolfman, chair of the ACSR and Fessenden professor of law.

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This is the amount Harvard pays in property taxes on Harvard Yard, Widener Library, Sever Hall and, for that matter, all properties devoted to fulfilling the educational mission of the College. Massachusetts law shelters all educational institutions from such burdens.

About six months ago, Mayor of Cambridge Sheila Doyle Russell and members of the Cambridge School Committee met with Rudenstine in the posh Faculty Club. They left with a baseball cap especially designed for the meeting: It had a veritas shield right above the word "Cambridge," symbolizing the teamwork between the city and the University.

Indeed, relations between the city and the University, particularly in the area of housing, are at a marked high. (Please see related story, page F-17)

But beyond the meetings, public relations photographs and reports--of which there have been many--some area residents think that Cambridge gets the short end of Harvard's big financial stick.

Harvard is the third-largest taxpayer in the city, contributing more than $8.1 million in taxes, voluntary payments, fees and services in 1996.